Hello!Hi, I'm Riley and I am a Redstone Engineer here at CubeCraft. I work alongside the other Designers to create fun and innovative minigames in Minecraft: Bedrock Edition.
In these sorts of threads, we explain and elaborate on the production process of one of our latest projects. This Marketplace Highlight thread features Flappy Dragon!
The IdeaA few other designers, admins and I have calls from time to time. Usually to relax and enjoy some games, but sometimes we also discuss projects or brainstorm for the next Marketplace hype. I showed them a quick project I made in less than a day. Sometimes I just get these bursts of inspiration and motivation and try and create it as fast as I can!
@Yamin agreed that it would be a cool concept to try on the Marketplace. Sometimes it's better to create something simplistic yet polished, rather than something incredibly complex and time-consuming.
Simple, right? But then... How do we boost replayability? Pillars should gradually speed up to make the game harder! There has to be a reliable detection system for when the dragon collides with a pillar! There should be a menu for the player to navigate through in their hotbar!
AaAaaAaaaaAand... Our project got a bit more complicated... It wasn't going to be finished as fast as my personal Java Edition version, but regardless it wouldn't take that long.
Production ProcessMy personal version was created in Java Edition which is rather limited in comparison to what we can do on the Bedrock Edition. @Exciting_pancake wrote the code for the custom pillars and dragons that @Yamin created.
Fun fact: the minigame needs almost 2000 lines of handwritten commands to run.
One of the ten dragons by @Yamin
Pillar behaviour by @Exciting_pancake
Technical Obstacles
One of the ten dragons by @Yamin
Pillar behaviour by @Exciting_pancake
Technical ObstaclesThe first issue was that due to how the game worked, the player could change their FOV to be able to see outside of the background. The image below should better illustrate what I mean!
After the backgrounds were already created, we noticed this slight problem and did some more research into how much the player is able to expand their FOV as is illustrated by the diamond blocks.
A second problem that we encountered throughout creating the behaviours for the pillars was that the collision detection system was often inaccurate. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to accurately detect collision using redstone only. @Exciting_pancake had to do some tweaking to the pillars' hitbox and after doing quite a bit of testing, we resolved the issue!
The third and final issue arose after Microsoft tested the project themselves. It did pass without any game-breaking issues, though the problem was that on less powerful devices, such as the iPhone 6, it would lag. The project got greylisted on low and mid-tier devices. We weren't necessarily required to resolve the lag, but that would mean we would miss out on a large portion of the player base. We decided to make some tweaks to improve the performance.
Marketplace QAAll our projects go through extensive testing before being shipped to Microsoft. The Design team and Marketplace QA team use Slack and Notion to communicate about the QA sessions and to coordinate them. Below is a screenshot of the first batch of bugs that were reported.
More
This amazing and addicting minigame is available on the Marketplace HERE!
If you want to become part of Team CubeCraft's Design team, feel free to check out our application form!
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